


you who are on the road

by evewithanapple



Category: Hair (1979)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-06
Updated: 2020-02-06
Packaged: 2021-02-27 18:48:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,858
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22590508
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/evewithanapple/pseuds/evewithanapple
Summary: Claude and Berger, crossing the border.
Relationships: George Berger/Claude Bukowski
Comments: 6
Kudos: 20
Collections: Chocolate Box - Round 5





	you who are on the road

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Arduinna](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Arduinna/gifts).



Hud is laughing at him. Ordinarily, he might put the thought down to hash-induced paranoia - not that he usually gets paranoid when they smoke up, but sometimes you catch a bad batch - but no, he’s not imagining things. Hud really is laughing at him.

Berger half-lifts his head from the ground. “Wasso funny?”

“You, man.” Hud waves a hand in the air, tracing a lazy arc in the dusky gloom. “That white boy’s got you fucked up.”

Berger turns his head. Claude is propped up against a wall, gaze rotating in circles, mouth hanging half-open as he follows - something. Fireflies, maybe. Or just something only he can see. It’s not the first time he’s gotten high, and this isn’t even the good stuff, but he still greets every toke with the reverence of a yogi. Berger wishes he could see what Claude sees; whatever it is, it seems to be keeping him entertained.

“I’m always fucked up, man,” he says vaguely. Woof and Jeanie are both sprawled across the grass, already dozy. They might have taken a few tabs of acid before they brought the joints out, he’s not sure. It’s hard to tell with those two; they always seem sleepy to begin with. Blurry, that’s the word. Untethered from reality without needing any psychedelic assistance.

“Extra fucked up,” Hud says. He blows two identical plumes of smoke out of his nostrils, a move Berger has always envied and never been able to master. “You know he’s gonna be gone soon, right? Up in one of them helicopters, then _whoosh_.” He forms one hand into the shape of a gun. “Wham bam thank you ma’am for Uncle Sam.”

The stars overhead seem to be moving. Maybe that’s what Claude’s looking at. “Might not. You dunno.”

Hud takes another long drag on the joint. “He’s got his card and everything, man.”

The card, Berger thinks, is probably still in his wallet. He’d shown it to them that first day they met, and actually looked offended when Jeanie tried to snatch it out of his grasp. Claude’s so out of it right now, Berger could probably crawl over, fish his wallet out, get the card, and burn it. He’s got a lighter right here. Claude would wake up in the morning and never know what happened. He’d probably think he dropped it somewhere in the park.

Of course, if his card did turn up missing, Claude would probably walk right up to the draft board anyway. Just stroll on in and announce that he was ready to go off to war. It seemed like the kind of thing Claude would do, and burning his card wasn’t gonna stop him from doing it.

“You still dunno,” he mutters, and Hud just keeps on laughing at him.

* * *

“You ever been to Canada?”

“Canada?” Claude looks baffled. Now, Claude looks baffled a lot of the time - like they’re on different radio frequencies, maybe. Maybe Claude needs to get stoned more often, if he wants to understand Berger. “Why would I have gone to Canada?”

Berger just shrugs. “Seems like a groovy place.”

Claude makes that _mmmph_ noise in the back of his throat that always sounds like he’s about to spit out a wad of tobacco. “Probably not that different from here.” He pauses. “Except they speak French.”

“Only in Quebec.” Berger, admittedly, doesn’t know a whole lot about Canada either; the few facts that have stuck in his brain came courtesy of a guy named Justin who used to hang with them in the park until he decided to take off for the border to keep from getting picked up for draft dodging. Justin had actually spoken French, which meant he had a leg up on the rest of the dodgers streaming north. Berger doesn’t know a damn word of French, but he could learn. He thinks. Or just not move to Quebec.

“I have a cousin in Alberta, I think.” Claude sounds doubtful. “Works on a ranch. Dunno why he had to go all the way up there to find a ranch to work on.”

“Family business,” Berger says, half-sensically. Even if he didn’t know Claude was fresh off a farm, he could have guessed. Everything about him screamed “corn-fed.” Pale hair, pale blue eyes, skin that burns lobster red in the sun. Berger can picture what he’d look like with a plough: stripped down the waist, jeans riding low on his hips, sweat rolling off his shoulders. He hadn’t got a lot of heft to him - not from what Berger can see, anyway - but he’s wiry. Berger’s never set foot on a farm in his life, but he could probably learn to love it, with a view like that. “You ever think about visiting? We could hop a bus tomorrow, be there by the end of the week.”

Claude’s look of bafflement only deepens. “I never even seen the guy before. Why would I just drop everything to go up there now?”

Another benefit of farming, Berger thinks, is that it doesn’t require a whole lot of deep thinking. It would be an unkind thought, but he groups himself with the rest of the lightweights. Don’t ask him to study anything deeper than a puddle, because he’s not going to. “You don’t gotta visit him,” he says. “Just. Canada. Stay there for a few months, maybe.” He gets the sense Claude isn’t picking up what he’s putting down, so he clarifies. “Until the war’s over?”

Claude sets a long piece of grass between his teeth, chewing slowly. Berger waits.

“You go up there,” he says, “you can’t come back. You’d get arrested.”

“If you go to Vietnam,” Berger says, “you’d get shot. Which would you rather?”

Claude looks thoughtful. Berger hopes he’s not actually weighing the merits of jail vs. getting shot.

Finally, he says, “what bus?”

They don’t take the bus - at least, not all the way. A Greyhound takes them up to Buffalo, but the final leg of the trip - the part where they actually cross the border - is done in the back of a pickup truck, lying under a crackling blue tarp. The guy who offers them a ride has a beard almost down to his stomach, and only grunts when Claude offers him money. They rattle around a loose collection of tools - a drill, a saw, a hammer - and Berger spares a thought to wonder whether or not the driver is going to kill them once they get across. He doesn’t, though.

When they land in Canada, they can hear Niagara Falls roaring in their ears. The air is damp with mist. Berger sticks his tongue out to see if it tastes any different from American water, and finds that it doesn’t.

“So,” Claude says, “what now?”

Berger sticks his thumb out and waggles it. “Now we hitch some more.”

* * *

They don’t have to go far, as it turns out; Niagara Falls borders on wine country, and there’s a dozen farms with “help wanted” signs; they’ve got their pick. Before they leave the Falls, though, Claude stops at a tourist stand and picks up a handful of postcards. All of them have the Falls stamped on the front, and some are in pastel rainbow colours. He buys a pen, too, a nice one.

“What d’you want those for?” Berger squints at Claude through the fog. “You gonna write the military to say goodbye?”

Claude shakes his head. “My folks,” he says. “And Sheila. Don’t you want to write anybody?”

Berger considers this, then shoplifts a card to send to Hud and the others. They’d offered to bring both Woof and Hud along with them, and been turned down: Woof wants to stay with Jeanie, who has no interest in Canada, and Hud was, in his words, “not feeling it.”

The farmer who hires them on to pick grapes asks no questions and doesn’t mention Claude’s lingering Oklahoma accent; probably they’re not the first Americans who’ve washed up on his land. Grape-picking isn’t a half bad way to make a living, especially when a good third of the stuff Berger picks goes into his mouth. They never get their hands on the wine, though. Claude laughs when Berger brings it up, and points out that the farmers aren’t the ones who make the wine; they sell their crops to a winery. “Shit,” Berger says, “we should go there next.”

Claude makes that “mmmph” noise again, and Berger knows they’re not going anywhere. The farmer keeps a pair of horses, both of whom take to Claude almost immediately. The farmer’s daughter, all of eight years old, is delighted to find that one of the new farmhands is a trick rider and begs for lessons. Then her friends start showing up to watch, and before Berger and Claude quite know what’s happening, they’ve got a side business set up in horse-riding lessons. They have to split the profits with the guy who owns the horses, but it’s not half-bad as a job. Helps to be useful once winter rolls around and there’s no grapes to pick.

“I could show you some tricks,” Claude offers, and Berger agrees gamely. He ends up falling on his ass a half-dozen times while the farmer’s daughter and her friends stand by and giggle at him. His pride isn’t that bruised, but his tailbone sure is.

“It’s not polite to point and laugh,” Claude says mildly, and the girls disperse. It’s rare these days that Berger gets Claude alone; the kids follow him like ducklings. He offers a hand to help Berger up. “You alright?”

“That horse is crazy, and so are we,” Berger says, but he accepts the hand up. There’s snow all over his jeans, and in his hair. He and Claude look at each other for a moment, pause, and burst out laughing. Berger reaches out to ruffle Claude’s hair, which is also frosted lightly with unmelted snowflakes. “How do you get those animals to do a damn thing? They don't listen."

"Neither do you," Claude says, still laughing. His cheeks are pink with cold. Berger's fingers and toes are numb, but his core still feels warm. That's the great thing about having Claude around: he's like a pocket piece of fire. Berger always feels warm around him. 

"I listen," he says, mock-offended. "Sometimes. To you." He hooks a hand in Claude's belt and drags him closer. Claude's eyes widen, and he casts a surreptitious look around the field, but there's nothing to worry about: the girls have all gone inside, and there's no one else around. 

"Just gotta give me the right motivation," he says, and kisses Claude. His lips are chapped and cold, but Berger can't say he minds. Claude's face turns an even brighter pink, but he's smiling. "Oh yeah? You gonna listen to me then?"

"I might." Berger kisses Claude again. "Gotta try it and see, yeah?"

Claude gives him one of those lingering looks, like he's trying to get on Berger's frequency. Then he leans in and kisses him, more of a bump of mouths than a kiss. That's fine. He'll learn. "I guess we will."

**Author's Note:**

> [Rainbow Niagara Falls poster](https://www.pinterest.ca/pin/475129829412249273/).


End file.
